Views fom the Fernsehturm

This is an aerial view of Berlin, looking toward the Tiergarten and Potsdamer Platz. The main boulevard that you see turns into Unter den Linden once it crosses the Museumsinsel (where the huge Berliner Dom is most obvious). This culminates in the famous Brandenburger Tur.

I took the photo from the panorama platform inside the Fernsehturm. There is always a line for going up in the tower, and Louise and I were both too hungry to join the second line for the TeleCafe on the next floor up. But the views were worth our time. It also helped to put into perspective the topographical relationships between different areas of the city that I'd already visited on foot! I had walked around the Tiergarten, diplomatic quarter, and Potsdamer Platz on my first weekend in Berlin (once the sun came out!). But I didn't have a sense of where all that lay in relation to the historic center and area around Alexanderplatz.

On the other side of the tower, I could look down on the Goethe-Institute where I commute every day for my language classes. You can just pick out the cross streets at the Weinmeisterstrasse U-Bahn station (where I pop up from under the city on the U-8 line each morning); these intersect at center right in the photo below. The Goethe-Institute is the building on a diagonal to the lower left of the intersection... Our classrooms are located around the second courtyard. These are the two black rooftops with lots of glass skylights. Good luck figuring this out!